Is "fifth-generation Fibre Channel" marketing-speak or a useful term?
Earlier this year the "Gen 5 Fibre Channel" term popped up from Brocade, which used it to describe 16GBit/s Fibre Channel, the computer network technology's highest available speed.
And Brocade started using the Gen 5 term around the time Cisco finally …

COMMENTS

The irony is....

"Cisco took exception to the new label"

I'm sure they did, as it's Brocade nicking the Cisco naming convention for the generations of supervisor cards in their 9K series FC switches.

For a few years now Cisco have called their switch bits Gen 1, gen 2, gen 3 etc. Each Gen tends to follow a speed uplift, so Gen 1 was 2Gbps, Gen 2 was 4 Gbps At the way they have been going, it would be reasonable to expect their "gen 5" series cards to be 16 or 32 Gbps

how cute

I love it when a company tries to make a new version of an obsolete technology. Last night I was helping to spec out a new FCoE network with four 40Gbe connections to each blade. Seems kinda funny anyone would want to invest heavily on FC when it's so insanely expensive and incredibly slow.

Re: how cute

Because the FCOE stuff is real cheap isn't it ?

Sorry that's a fail FCOE carries the same price tag yet lacks the scale and more importantly the maturity and eco system support offered by FC, that's why you still need native FC ports for the other peripherals.